Ocean Inspiration

Photos by Ryan Moser / Story by Katrina Mae Leuzinger

Step into Harry Meraklis’s home studio in Kitty Hawk and you’re immediately confronted with a nine-foot-high octopus painted on the far wall in vibrant purple. It’s the prototype for Rundown Café’s new three-dimensional sign that now graces the beach road – along with a few matching interior murals – but at one point not so long ago, it was just an idea swimming around Harry’s head.

“Look at that,” Harry says, pointing to a photograph of the real thing hanging on a nearby workbench. “That’s badass. It’s like a piece of art just crawling around on the ocean floor. You can’t even make it up.”

An avid fisherman, Harry has always been drawn to the sea, and he began spending family vacations on the Outer Banks when he was three years old.

“My dad took me fishing every minute he had,” explains Harry proudly as he gestures to one of several photographs of his father that’s displayed on his studio walls.

Those family vacations from Pennsylvania continued long after Harry had a family of his own, and it was during one such trip that his wife, Eileen, remarked on all the carved and painted fish in the gift shops. That was something he could do, she suggested. And not only could he make keepsakes like that, he could do it better.

“I used to paint in junior high, high school and college all the time. But then you start working, and oftentimes you just stop,” says Harry. “I wanted to start again.”

A printer by trade, Harry also minored in fine art in college, but more or less hadn’t used those skills since then. So even though he was a bit rusty, he used hand tools to carve, and then paint, a small fish. Then he made a few more.

When it came time for their next family vacation, Harry stopped into the Kill Devil Hills Cooperative and showed his fish to owner, Julie Moye. Julie, who started the gallery in order to feature and promote local artists – many of whom take turns running and organizing the gallery and teaching some classes in the second-story studio space – immediately fell in love with Harry’s work.

There was just one problem. “We were still living in Pennsylvania,” Harry says. “So I told Julie, ‘I don’t live here yet – but I will soon.’”

True to his word, Harry moved to Kitty Hawk in 2012 and HarryFish Art was born. Harry was soon spending the majority of his time working at the co-op, making and selling his fish, and catching the real thing whenever he could.

Though he started out with his namesake carved fish, each one a unique piece of art, he quickly expanded to other mediums as well. Spending hours in the gallery every day made him want to start painting on canvas again, using brushes, pallet knives and sometimes sparkling broken glass to capture fish, octopi, turtles and the occasional goat or brightly plumed bird.

Harry at the KDH Cooperative.

Regardless of his chosen animal, Harry’s paintings always seem to draw the eye towards a detail that might otherwise have been easily overlooked – a gaping mouth, a perfectly curved tentacle, a big, bulbous eye. The subject is almost always on a jet-black background and painted in colors more heightened than what occurs in real life.

“I’m not interested in doing things that are hyper-realistic. I just don’t have that kind of patience,” jokes Harry.

Inspiration also comes from his own family. His uncle, Constantine Kermes, was a famous painter, although he was fonder of painting humans than sea life. While talking about him, Harry gives a lot of the credit for his uncle’s success to Constantine’s wife, Bessie.

“You need someone with a good eye that’s not yours,” Harry says. “My Aunt Bessie used to do that for him.”

And he speaks from experience. For Harry, that eye belongs to his own wife, Eileen, who’s also a nurse at the Outer Banks Hospital and mother to their three children – one of whom now has a couple kids of his own.

“She’s my creative rudder,” says Harry. “Almost everything I paint, I show to her. When I lose my direction, she’ll say, ‘the colors are wrong’ or ‘the head is great’ or ‘the eye is terrible.’

“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘just paint over it,’” he adds with a laugh.

Most of the time he listens to her, and most of the time she’s right. Which is why his distinctive art can now be found in shops all over the Outer Banks and beyond – and once even showed up on an episode of Hawaii Five-0.

“I can’t paint something I’m not excited about. I just can’t,” Harry says about his process. “And certain creatures just have to be painted – they’re too amazing not to.”